Trudeau Appoints Author David Adams Richards to the Senate

David Adams Richards as photographed by David Middleton for a 2000 interview with January Magazine.

David Adams Richards, one of Canada’s most esteemed and celebrated authors, has been appointed to the Canadian senate.

Richards is the only author to have won Canada’s most sought after literary prize, the Governor General’s Award, for both fiction and non-fiction.

In an interview with CBC news, Richards said, “I’ve written 30, 31 books and I would like to do something else. I think I might be able to offer something. I was asked by friends to apply and I said, ‘Well, OK. I’ll do this and see what happens.’ I didn’t think I’d be selected, but I’m so very grateful and honoured that I was.”

Richards is Trudeau’s 29th pick for the Senate.

“I am extremely — extremely — proud to have asked Mr. Richards to serve in the Senate of Canada. He is someone who is well known to us all as a novelist, an essayist, a poet, who has done an extraordinary job of telling the stories of the Miramichi River valley, of New Brunswick, and indeed of Canada, to Canadians and the world,” Trudeau told reporters Wednesday during a visit to [New Brunswick].